Jencunas: Trump’s Executive Order is Cruel

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Brian Jencunas, MINDSETTER™

Another week, another protest against President Donald Trump, this time about his executive order banning citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia from entering the United States. The order is cruel, separating families and targeting even people who risked their lives to serve as translators for American soldiers, but you don’t need to be a teary-eyed romantic to oppose it. The order does almost nothing to make us safer and it damages our relationship with the Middle Eastern partners we need to help fight ISIS.

To be clear, Trump’s executive order is not a Muslim ban. The order not only promulgates no religious test, but it excludes many predominantly Muslim countries, including Indonesia, home to the more Muslims than any other nation. Instead of a religious ban, Trump is targeting a list of countries seemingly chosen by randomly throwing darts at a map of the Middle East.

The nations on his list are not the ones that produce the most terrorists. The list ignores Saudi Arabia, home of most 9/11 hijackers and Tunisia, a nation that is one of the largest sources of ISIS recruits and was labeled “The Jihadi Factory” by the widely respected Foreign Policy magazine. Egypt and Pakistan were also excluded despite being hotbeds of radical Islam. As the conservative, usually pro-Trump Daily Caller wrote in a headline, “Nations Hit By Trump Travel Ban Have Produced 7 Percent of Muslim Terrorists, ZERO Fatalities” Of the seven countries, only Somalia and Iran have ever had a citizen who committed an act of terrorism in the United States. A college sophomore with access to LexisNexis could have put together a better list than the Trump White House.

Though this action will do little to make Americans safer, it will make fighting terrorism much harder. If the Trump administration wants to defeat ISIS they will need the help of Middle Eastern governments, especially in Iraq where ISIS still controls territory. Having allies in Iraq is not a choice, it’s inevitable unless we want to invade the country again and fight the war entirely by ourselves. Antagonizing seven Middle Eastern countries with this ban, which predominantly hurts the kind of wealthy citizens who can influence their government, will only make our military operations in the region harder.

In fact, a Muslim ban would have been preferable to this ill-conceived, horribly executed plan. At least that would have been promulgating a clear doctrine – a full-throated endorsement of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. That would have been the wrong message to send since but it at least would have been a coherent doctrine. This is just an ill-conceived, poorly executed idea that does nothing but let Donald Trump fulfill a campaign promise.

According to NBC, the executive order was not reviewed by the Justice Department, State Department, Department of Defense, or Department of Homeland Security; also known as “organizations that might have experience with keeping America safe.” Instead, it was designed by Steve Bannon, a man whose foreign policy experience consists of being a naval submarine officer. Separately from this executive order, he was appointed to the National Security Council, the committee that essentially runs the White House’s aspects of American foreign policy. While Bannon was elevated, the nation’s highest ranking military officer was demoted. As a real estate developer, Trump would never have put his accountant in charge of pouring concrete, but seems to think his campaign team can replace subject matter experts when it comes to the most important foreign policy decisions. It’s a recipe for disaster.

What’s truly frightening is that this was the policy the Trump administration produced after the most peaceful time an administration ever has – their transition period. For over two months, there were no foreign policy crises, no bills to lobby Congress about, and no domestic policy to implement. All they had to do was pick a cabinet and figure out their first moves. They come up with one of the worst executive orders in modern political history. If this is what the Trump White House produces after their only prolonged period of peaceful deliberation, I shudder at what could happen during a terrorist attack or a 21st century version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.